Illinois as a Plantation without warm weather

A comment from Lincolnlander over at today's Daily Herald. Illinois's Plantation Politics without Louisiana's warmth.

The decline of the Republican party as a principled and meaningful alternative to the Machine has permitted the Machine and its creatures like Blago to run roughshod across the state. Much of the blame must rest with "Big Jim" who took the Republican party down the path to George Ryan whose corrupt attitudes and political positions differed in few meaningful ways from those of the Machine. Principled Republicans like Peter Fitzgerald and Steve Rauschenberger were pushed to the side as the party forgot the honest, middle-class voters who were the natural Republican constituency and the natural resistance to Blagocratic and Machine values.

The result has been the transformation of Illinois into a modern plantation, a cold-weather version of Louisiana where a corrupt white elite exchanges its kickbacks on the foundation of massive non-white poverty. It's particularly offensive that this transformation has been accomplished as we approach the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, a man whose life was devoted to individual freedom and human dignity and whose values would be only so much toilet paper to Blago and the Machine that controls "The Land of Lincoln."

About sums up today's Illinois.